I’m in the midst of a running debate on another board, and one of the central questions is this one. His claim is that atheism is a relatively “new” idea. My counter is that while the movement, or what we see as “organized” atheism may well be relatively recent, but as long as there have been people actively worshipping SOMETHING, that there have been non-believers.
But then again, this guy claims to know there are 850 atheists in North America, so…
Such a simnple question, but I can’t dig up a good answer anywhere.
Can you have a non-believer without a believer?
If yes, then you have to identify the first person ever (just a bit dicey), and then figure out if he or she worshipped.
If no, then you need to find the first believer ever, and see what everyone else thought at the time. Good luck with that one also.
Or do you want to find the first athiest ever and see if there were any believers around at the time?
This is one of those questions which will never have a satisfactory answer in GQ, but could have a long and healthy life in Great Debates.
To a “true believer” (assuming a Judeo-Christian slant here, but similar for any religion), Diety existed before any people were created, including atheists. Since Adam and Eve believed in Diety, the concept of atheism was not born until later generations.
To an atheist the answer would be that mankind evolved and did not get around to creating gods until sometime later, therefore atheists have been around longer.
:wally No, not you, Him. There were eggs before there were chickens due to the fact that other species laid eggs before chicken existed. The reason this debate ran so long is that people think along straight lines, and asociated eggs with chickens only.
That would be so much funnier of a comment if I could have stuck-out egg and put in human, but the stikeout mark is about as frequently used as the tilde.
That was more or less the position I took also. To me, logic says that as long as there have been believers, there had to have been non-believers, eh?
That said, how about tossing this into the mix: The young fella seems to think that someone worshiping a pagan god, or not adhering to some sort of organized religious belief, can still be atheistic. Ok, by definition, atheism is “One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.”
See what I’m arguing with here? Maybe I ought to just convey a blessing that the poor fella smoke some ganja and find Haile Selasse?
I you assume that deities are things that humans create, then there were probably atheists before there were deities. Unless the very first human created a deity.
I you assume that deities predate and/or created humans, then the atheists came later. Although atheists do not need something specific to believe against.
This reminds me of the time that my little sister announced that she had discovered the answer to the question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? She had been reading Genesis, where it says that the fowls were created. I didn’t rain on her parade, but at the time it dawned on me that, evolutionarily speaking, the egg came first.
It was a fish egg, probably. If you want it to have a shell, it was a reptile egg. If you want it to be a chicken egg, it gets a little more problematic.
So, are you a chickenist or an eggist? Oh, and there are more than 850 of us.
He is absolutely correct. Plus probably several million in addition to that small group.
You need for him to define his terms better. Atheism is relatively new relative to the time since the big bang but ask him to put it into a useful context. As for his definition of atheist you might deliver a dictionary to him, in the style of Ignatz Mouse.
This is the most infuriating individual I’ve never met I’m telling you…Having a dialogue based on any kind of factual basis descends into a surreal world of “I read once that…” then a blind, random citing of imaginary facts. I KNOW who the whippersnapper is, and since he’s still a minor, while being a major pain in the ass, I wouldn’t want to risk jail time for the dictionary delivery.
Perhaps I’ll just hire the chess team to stomp on him…
Doesn’t it boil down to an article of faith rather than fact? You either believe that “God” created man, perhaps reasoning that man couldn’t create himself, or you believe that man created the concept of “God” out of his imagination. Almost everybody picks one. No one on either side has ever convinced anyone on the other side, probably because it’s impossible.
Yet they keep trying. This thread definitely belongs in GD rather than GQ…
All of you mockers are damned to Hel. Why you ask? Because you refuse to aknowledge the Sovereignty of Odin, the All Father, who so loved knowledge that he sacrificed himself to himself, in order that mankind, (and himself) might have eighteen magical runes.
But…
There isn’t any debate. Sure, I like making threats, which if I every really met the guy, I would deliver in the form of crushing arguments, but, there isn’t really a debate. The guy is wrong. No two ways about it.
Oh, I dunno. The belief in some sort of supernatural is widely believed to precede anthromorphized Gods and organized religions, yes? And both precede written records?
I find it difficult to believe that there were pre-literate people who went around thinking things like “well, I suppose I could explain this phenomenon by imagining an all-powerful being who causes things to happen, but nah…” So I have to believe that the first “atheist” in any meaningful sense was someone who chose not to believe someone else’s supernatural explanation for something. The theist would come first, if only by half a conversation.
What is the first recorded writing which said, essentially, “You know those Gods (that God, whatever) that you’re finding all my countrymen writing about on the steles in the ruins? I don’t buy it.”
What manhattan said. Especially if your definition of atheist is one who proclaims"such and such a god does not exist." The god has to be affirmed before it can be denied.
Define “new”? Socrates was tried in ancient Athens in 399 B.C.E accused of amongst other things being an atheist. (His accusers are also said to have charged him with believing in false gods. Apparently their logic wasn’t too good.) That Socrates was tried for being an atheist over 2,400 years ago is proof that the ancient Greeks were familiar with atheists. Unless this person you were debating considers 2,400 years ago to be “new”, you can win the argument by citing Plato’s Apology.
If he does consider 2,400 years ago to be “new”, the problem is we don’t know whether there were atheists back to the dawn of man, as these very early civilizations lacked the ability to write. There just aren’t any surviving texts by Neanderthals saying “there are absolutely no atheists amongst us.”
Sorry if this has been said - but what if you can define an atheist as a person who’s brain does not contain belief in a higher power. So God would not have to be affirmed for the person to lack belief in it.
Also, what about earlier evolutions of man? Did the early homo-sapiens consider the possibility of a higher power, or did they take existence for granted like I suspect other animals do.
ehh? last time I looked, a word was made of it’s component parts. Saying a atheist “Denies God” is too accept a church sponsered bith of propaganda. Sure, alot of people believe that to be the belief tyhat atheist hold, but alot of people believe that it would be a good idea to vote for a president who would keep those upity gay where they belong, but that doen’t make them right.
To see the point being made over and over again, see below:
The easiest way to define ‘atheism’, is to look at the word ‘atheist’ instead. The word is composed of two parts: ‘theist’ and it’s negation (the ‘a-’ in front of the word). [The negation is equivalent to the ‘u-’ in ‘utopia’ (the ‘no-place’; the name is meant to imply that the place is just a thought-experiment, not a real country)].
The word ‘theist’ means “a person who believes in the existence of god”. The operative word here is “believes”, not “existence” as is often claimed. This means that the atheist “does not believe in god”. You might think that this means that (as claimed by theists) the atheists believes that god doesn’t exist. But the logical structure of the sentence is not what ordinary language might (mis)lead us to think. Look at the following sentences:
I believe that God exists
I do not believe that God exists
I believe that God does not exist
The above shows what atheism really is and is not. The first view is obviously theism. The view expressed by sentence number 3 (what theists usually claim atheism to be) might be called “strong atheism”. It could also be expressed as the claim that “there is no god”. The “problem” with the view is that it is so strong that very few people (if any) would accept it. The usual form of atheism is, instead, expressed by sentence number 2: “I do not believe”, or even better, “I have no belief concerning…”
The point of the latter view is that instead of making a positive claim about whether of not god exists, the atheist refuses to have an opinion either way. The atheist does not have a belief concerning the matter.
hehehe